Fall 2005
If not specified, the seminars will be held in Room 138 Wohlers Hall, at 11:00AM on Friday morning.
This semester, in addition to the regular paper presentations, we will have a technology series that aim to present new information technologies that have social, economic or organizational implications beyond the technology itself. The seminar takes a presentation-discussion format. First a colleague gives a prepared presentation on a particular technology with demonstrations and some thoughts on where the technology's impact will be. This can take anywhere from twenty to forty minutes. Then we open up the floor and continue the discussions. The technology series serves two purposes. First, it updates us, the information systems researchers, with the newest technologies that are the subject of our research. Second, through discussions, we may have new sparks for research ideas.
The regular paper series, like before, take the format of a 45-minute to one-hour presentation followed by discussions.
| Date | Presentation Type | Presenter | Title |
| September 23 | Technology Series | Mu Xia | Google Maps and API: It's No Longer Just About Directions! |
| September 30 | Paper Series | Prasanna Karhade | Contract Term and
Extensibility: An Empirical Analysis of IT Outsourcing Contracts |
| October 7 | Paper Series | Judith Gebauer | Information System Flexibility and the Performance of Business Processes |
| October 28 | Technology Series | Kexin Zhao | RSS and blogs |
| Praranna Karhade | Cell phone technologies | ||
| November 4(postponed from October 21) | Paper Series | Ramanath Subramanyam and Mu Xia | Open Source Software Development in Developing and Developed Countries: A Comparative Study |
Mu Xia
(PDF)
Google Maps (http://maps.google.com) offer maps and high-resolution satellite images of North America and many other parts of the world. What is most interesting is the Google Maps Application Programming Interface (API) made available to the public by Google. It can be used as a base by another program to develop new web-based applications when combined with other location-related information. We will demonstrate a few interesting and innovative applications and briefly show how Google API can be used. We will also discuss new, broader research issues that arise from this.
Prasanna Karhade (karhade@uiuc.edu)
Ramanath Subramanyam (rsubrama@uiuc.edu)
Anjana Susarla (asusarla@u.washington.edu)
(Authors names listed alphabetically. All authors contributed
equally)
Firms often use formal or explicit contracts as governance devices to
administer, manage and coordinate market-based transactions such as outsourced
information technology (IT) projects. As investments in outsourced IT projects
grow, the need to understand the design of these formal or explicit contracts
becomes crucial. The design of contracts entails careful crafting of contractual
properties — such as contract term, compensation mechanisms, termination related
clauses, etc — as they have important economic and behavioral implications. We
examine 52 such formal contracts written for IT services to investigate whether
they possess properties as suggested by contract theory. We combine constructs
from transaction costs economics (TCE) and agency theory (AT) to understand
drivers of contractual properties, specifically contract term and provisions of
contract extensibility. Contrary to theoretical predictions, we find that in the
domain of IT contracts, technological uncertainty, and not asset specificity, is
associated with longer contractual terms. Further, we find that firms craft
contracts with extensible terms for IT tasks that are highly programmable.
Judith Gebauer
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
gebauer@uiuc.edu
Franz Schober
Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany
franz.schober@vwl.uni-freiburg
University of Illinois College of Business Working Paper,
05-0112 (pdf)
While insufficient flexibility of an information system to support a business
process precludes the use of the system in certain cases, excessive flexibility
of an information system can limit the usability of the system (Silver 1991), in
addition to presenting an unnecessary investment. Despite a wealth of research
on flexibility and its impacts on organizations and business processes (esp.
manufacturing), the value of flexibility of an information system and the price
at which it comes have rarely been included into the analysis, with the result
that guidelines to manage the flexibility of an information system to support a
given business process have not been developed.
To support decisions regarding information system flexibility, the current paper
presents an optimization model to relate business process characteristics
(uncertainty, variability, and time-criticality) with two basic types of
information system flexibility (flexibility to use the information system and
flexibility to change the information system). Based on an analysis of the
model, we conclude that the focus of information system management should be on
flexibility to change the information system in order to support processes of
high uncertainty, while situations of low uncertainty call for a focus on
flexibility to use the information system. The model also shows that high
process variability can limit the value of investments in an information system
altogether, thus, improving the importance of careful flexibility management,
while a high level of time-criticality generally tends to increase the benefits
of using an information system over manual processing.
Keywords: information system flexibility, information system design and
development decision support, business process performance, optimization model.
Ramanath Subramanyam and Mu Xia
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
(PDF)
How do participants in open source software (henceforth OSS) development in different countries differ in the preference for OSS projects? How do their incentives to participate in OSS development differ across global boundaries? This study performs a comparative analysis of drivers of open source participation across North American, Chinese and Indian OSS development communities. We find that there are significant differences in motives for OSS participation across these communities. We also find significant region-level differences in how different success factors are related to one other.
Please write to Mu Xia for questions and comments.
Last update October 7, 2005.